Sephora Borrows Some Tricks From Beauty Vloggers

Sephora has always been more than a pretty face; the beauty chain started a revolution in France by moving beauty products out from behind the counter, wresting their control from sales assistants.

Sephora now dominates the retail sector for beauty in stores and online; its unique selection has even helped it fend off Amazon—for now—according to a 2016 report from L2. Sephora parent company, luxury conglomerate LVMH, singled out Sephora's success in its 2016 report, which highlighted the launch of online stores in six new countries last year.

But Sephora's latest creation, the Beauty Insider Community, is one of its most savvy moves yet. Beauty vloggers earn serious ad dollars from tutorials, Instagram influencers take home a small fortune in sponsored content, and beauty fans spend hours asking and answering questions on beauty subreddits. With its Beauty Insider Community, Sephora brings these people inside its domain, where they can share tips, ask questions, and—most importantly—buy more Sephora products in one place.

Beauty Insider is free to join. Fill out a brief profile for entry into the walled, glittery garden. The community is divvied up into Groups, Conversations, and Gallery. Groups is for those who live the hashtag life and want to focus on specific interests (skincare, hair, lips). Conversations is where beauty insiders post tips, ask for advice, and even vent about being labelled a "rookie" on the new platform. Anyone who has been on the wrong side of the SkincareAddiction subreddit knows what a powerful thing community can be.

But the real power of the Beauty Insider Community resides in its Gallery, which looks a lot like Instagram.

Browse row after row of snaps and videos from Beauty Insiders sporting custom makeup looks. Beauty Insiders can link to their own YouTube tutorial or write up their steps so others can get the same look. But each shot has a carousel of the products used, all of which are for sale on Sephora, of course. You no longer have to ask about lipstick color or mascara brand in Instagram comments or swipe up to shop.

With a few quick clicks, a cart can be filled—and a credit card maxed out. A coppery fall look, for example, will cost you some serious gold coin: $466. While members of the Beauty Insider Community adopt a sugary tone familiar to those who frequent fashion and beauty communities ("Hi, ladies!"), Sephora knows that to be the most popular, you should probably also have the most cash.

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In recent days, word about Nvidia’s new Turing architecture started leaking out of the Santa Clara-based company’s headquarters. So it didn’t come as a major surprise that the company today announced during its Siggraph keynote the launch of this new architecture and three new pro-oriented workstation graphics cards in its Quadro family.
Nvidia describes the new Turing architecture as “the greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006.” That’s a high bar to clear, but there may be a kernel of truth here. These new Quadro RTx chips are the first to feature the company’s new RT Cores. “RT” here stands for ray tracing, a rendering method that basically traces the path of light as it interacts with the objects in a scene. This technique has been around for a very long time (remember POV-Ray on the Amiga?). Traditionally, though, it was always very computationally intensive, though the results tend to look far more realistic. In recent years, ray tracing got a new boost thanks to faster GPUs and support from the likes of Microsoft, which recently added ray tracing support to DirectX.
“Hybrid rendering will change the industry, opening up amazing possibilities that enhance our lives with more beautiful designs, richer entertainment and more interactive experiences,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “The arrival of real-time ray tracing is the Holy Grail of our industry.”
The new RT cores can accelerate ray tracing by up to 25 times compared to Nvidia’s Pascal architecture, and Nvidia claims 10 GigaRays a second for the maximum performance.
Unsurprisingly, the three new Turing-based Quadro GPUs will also feature the company’s AI-centric Tensor Cores, as well as 4,608 CUDA cores that can deliver up to 16 trillion floating point operations in parallel with 16 trillion integer operations per second. The chips feature GDDR6 memory to expedite things, and support Nvidia’s NVLink technology to scale up memory capacity to up to 96GB and 100GB/s of bandwidth.
The AI part here is more important than it may seem at first. With NGX, Nvidia today also launched a new platform that aims to bring AI into the graphics pipelines. “NGX technology brings capabilities such as taking a standard camera feed and creating super slow motion like you’d get from a $100,000+ specialized camera,” the company explains, and also notes that filmmakers could use this technology to easily remove wires from photographs or replace missing pixels with the right background.
On the software side, Nvidia also today announced that it is open sourcing its Material Definition Language (MDL).
Companies ranging from Adobe (for Dimension CC) to Pixar, Siemens, Black Magic, Weta Digital, Epic Games and Autodesk have already signed up to support the new Turing architecture.
All of this power comes at a price, of course. The new Quadro RTX line starts at $2,300 for a 16GB version, while stepping up to 24GB will set you back $6,300. Double that memory to 48GB and Nvidia expects that you’ll pay about $10,000 for this high-end card.

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